Skullcrack City (6 page)

Everything was important.

Everything was silver. I started stacking Hex, lighting the next high off the still burning butt end of the last.

Pick up runs to Port and Egbert hit every three days, no matter how much I’d previously acquired. Demand kept exceeding supply. Purchase protocols were back in place. Old patterns returned to sense memory.

No one saw me as Kirby anymore. I’d appropriated the right look. A sheen of sweat, the smell of accidental neglect and starvation on my breath.

Egbert nicknamed me. “What up, Crooked D?”

Port laughed from the shadows. He stayed back there, though—I picked up new nerves from him, imagined he kept his hand on his pistol when I approached.

“Same ol’ same, Egs, plus two more packets.”

“Shit. You setting up your own shop? You know it doesn’t work that way with Hex…”

“No. No. No. These are all for me. I’m right on the verge of something important. I don’t want the tank running low.”

And I knew then that he would ask Port to follow me. Trust was an idea not permitted here. The rumors regarding the Hex trade were never just rumors. I’d seen the documentary
Hexposé
: Folks who tried to deal Hex without the right contacts and suppliers in place lost their eyelids and lived forever fearful lives in mist-goggles.

Blood rituals to show loyalty? I could see it. The missing fingers on both Hungarian and Egbert? Maybe the trade was tied into the Yakuza (or just a big fan of their marketing).

I rushed home that night with nary a swerve or glance which could be perceived as me reselling Egbert’s merch. Hoped Port was satisfied with what he saw.

Home safe, seeing the invisible.

They saw everything. The infrared eyes of the surveillance state created a constricting red web across my skin.

Picturing it as One Large Eye would be a mistake. One Large Eye could be deceived. You could hide outside of its view or hope to blind it. Instead I imagined the air as a silver ocean filled with bioluminescent krill, each tiny organism trained to receive one type of data. The motion of a hand sent out purple ripples modeling the likely cause and purpose of the movement. The eye twitch of REM slumber triggered tiny green waves resulting in Common Sleep Patterns of Subject. Yellow waves followed sexual activity, determining possible needs for future hospital care or progeny-based loans. And the corporate Overlords owned the Blue Whales, massive cloud beasts fused together from drone-extracted data and evolving algorithms. Only our masters could understand the alien song of their information behemoths.

This knowledge was buzzing inside my skin.

Someone was reaching for god-like power.

But who? And why?

The default response, emitted from cell towers at frequencies below conscious perception:
Who are you to ask?

I decided my best option for evasion was to hew to understandable consumer patterns while displaying just enough randomized behavior to allow a few moments for escape if they decided it was time for my termination. If I couldn’t predict what I’d do, how the hell would they?

Went to the SavMart and spent one hundred dollars on baby carrots. Abandoned those carrots in the jewelry section at Macy’s.

Every Monday I bought a cheapie cell, logged it into a social site under my real account, broke the screen, then tossed the phone into bum carts/baby strollers/train cars.

Triangulate that shit, Blue Whale. Where can you expect to find me on a Monday night?

Work emails were responded to promptly. I ate three slices of pizza every Friday, though I had no appetite. “Marathon training” was the catch-all lie to diffuse concern over weight loss and triple black bags under my eyes. Reports were filed in which new loans to Delta MedWorks were listed as “perfected and well-secured.” Meets All Requirements.

Beats All Machines. For now.

Even with the Hex in constant rotation, I knew this was a rigged game. But I was convinced they could tell I was changing. I was joining their team, playing commerce games in the only way they respected: Pure Cutthroat. I was evolving fast enough to survive in their world.

Fear made me wise. Hex fed me opportunities and the courage to take them.

See an open semi-truck trailer? See the driver rolling in the warehouse bay doors with a pallet that will take at least ten minutes to unload? That’s an opportunity.

That’s me with three boosted laptops. The first got burnt two cities away—researched undernet set-up then sent it swimming in the river. The second bought the extra computer gear I needed and had it shipped to an abandoned house across town. The third, finally, was wired in at my place, encrypted enough to let me research Delta MedWorks and all of its tendrils without fearing immediate reprisal.

Plus: Even better porn access.

Learning how to force something broken to continue to perform its primary function is called a workaround.

My “Crooked D” needed some help. New faces, new lubricants, new hand positions, varying times of day, trying my best to remember my scar tissue treatments. Workarounds. Necessity is the mother of… well, let’s not use the word “mother” in this particular conversation.

I’d finally found a way to pull off the phone calls from mom. Fear of needles and concern over the ultra-questionable nature of Hex interactions kept me from actual speedballing, but I found a suitable alternative in chugging a glass jug of table wine. The combo left me with a woozy forty-five minute paranoia suppression window.

Pop. Chug. Call. Listen. Say “I love you, mom” the moment I heard the clicking mandibles of the sonic transmission mites. “Next week.” “Sure, mom.” “Bye, honey.” Hang up. Throw up if needed. Cry as a defense mechanism to shed excess shame and confusion, if needed.

I could feel time running out, but on whose clock?

I didn’t notice my money running out until the pet store clerk asked me if maybe I had another card I’d like to use.

Six weeks since my first pill and I was tweeking on credit. A cash advance is not the first, nor does it do the latter. I knew that from years of watching clients drowned under their own waves of need. And I knew I needed my own bank to extend me enough credit to allow me to complete my wholesale destruction of their institution.

I assumed whichever marauding bank took over and hired me would be willing to write off the debt. Such was my voyage across the Delusion Möbius Strip.

My trips out to the Street of Flowers started to feel like work. Buying Hex at twenty-five percent interest was double-ugly. But I’d pay them back. There’d be loads of payback. I’d found some very strange foreign wires to Delta’s overseas pharma testing facilities. Massive amounts of money which had conveniently avoiding federal reporting. And there was something happening right here in town, too, a single doctor’s office—Tikoshi Maxillofacial Surgery—being funded via zero balance account transfers from twelve different businesses I knew pledged Delta allegiance.

I was so close to something real. There were a few pins left before the tumbler lock clicked over. I had traction. Momentum. Meaning.

And then the news hit: The identities of the bodies in the “gruesome missing brain murders” on 45
^th
had been released.

The first was a nobody, some punk whose finest hour was a series of arsons, lighting up hospital restroom trashcans for kicks.

The second was a dealer with suspected drug gang and occult ties named Kevin Pendergast.

Street name: Hungarian Minor.

No, it was not good news. Especially since my Hex stash had me just four pills away from a rhino rape of a comedown. I popped sick sweat at the specter of the thought. Not an option.

I had to run containment. My hyper-consumption had already put Egbert and Port on edge. This Hungarian situation would have them on full alarm.

Worse—I’d received an email from the bank. The extension of my credit line had been denied. Debt-to-income ratios were insufficient for our new, stricter lending standards. My revolving account balances had been too high for too long.

“Too high for too long”—
What did they know? Was this a warning?

The cowboy who’d passed my file to underwriting stopped by my office the next day. “You know how it is, Doyle—Fed’s got our credit standards tighter than a nun’s butthole. We’ll have Nancy in QC review your file and then seal it in employee archives so it’s not floating around the bank. Nobody needs to know your business.”

A pat on the shoulder. A Sorry Pal concern face he’d perfected over decades. But he was smiling by the time he rounded the corner out of my office—the sweet, sweet taste of schadenfreude.

I pictured him hovering over a burn barrel on 45
^th
, trying to figure out how he’d ended up there after all his years of service to the bank. Gas punks with quarter roll fist packs approached him from behind. The snarl of a black wolf rolled in low past my left ear, giving my Hex daydream a new authority—
Make them hurt
. The punks did their work. Fists swinging. A face transformed, the sound of falling coins and snapping bones. Future me as witness, shrugging right by.

Fuck This Bank.

See how the bank still hasn’t employed anyone to fill their Bruxton 505 compliance requirements? See how that means the Foreign Transit Comp General Ledger is being reconciled only once every quarter? That’s an opportunity.

Any deposit or transfer into my account for greater than ten thousand dollars would automatically be flagged for review. Any funds received from an internal GL other than payroll or benefits was sure to end up on a security screen by nightfall. But by the close of my extended lunch that day—rendered overlong by a round trip commute to and from my undernet connection—Client Rep Stephanie Richmond had received an email request for the addition of one “Martin S. Peppermill” to the MK-Oil travel account.

Would you be surprised to find that when we dealt with MK-Oil—a US petroleum product distribution arm for one of the big four—we neglected our federally mandated due diligence with regards to new account set-up? Billion dollar balances turned rules into polite suggestions.

See how Client Rep Stephanie Richmond abandons all of her other projects to set up a new MK-Oil account based on the barest of information? See how she orders Card Services to express issue an ATM card—with a withdrawal limit override encoded—shipped to an address one city away? I could see it. I saw that kind of thing every day, but always as a begrudging bystander, a silent witness in need of the next paycheck. Now I was playing the game.

The sensation was like jumping into a rocky swimming hole on the first truly hot day of summer. Everything was fear and concern and hesitation, but once I committed and dove and surfaced all I could feel was exhilaration and bewilderment as to why I hadn’t jumped sooner. And I was filled with the desire to do it again.

So I transferred funds from the Foreign Transit Comp GL—an amount small enough and odd enough to appear non-material to anyone concerned.

So I drove to my appointed drop spot and copped Martin S. Peppermill’s ATM card just two days later.

So I used a third party bank’s ATM—jutting baseball cap and tilted head concealing the majority of my face from the fish-eye lens—and scored enough cash to lock down another week of Hex and ensure that my mission continued at full force.

Waves of paranoia crashed against a new bulkhead of confidence.

Are they watching? They’re always watching. But maybe now they respect me.

I saw myself as an amusing anomaly, a now-larger blip on the Overlord radar. I told jokes to the empty air during the commute home. I could feel them listening, disarmed. My data was highlighted, a tiny Blue Whale was assigned solely to my life patterns. I did fifty push-ups before jerking off, hoping the infra-red surveillance footage would be arousing.

I decided Deckard was the most handsome turtle who had ever lived. I posted new turtle photos to my online accounts every day.

Realizing I had access to money whenever I needed it had freed me intellectually. I devoted more time to investigating Delta MedWorks, until I had a near perfect copy of our bank files in my apartment. It became easier to ignore the physical realities—bloody noses, head and toothaches, deepening wrinkles, backed-up pipes, a mangled penis subjected to the Spanish Inquisition of self-abuse. My body was an Externality until the moment the Hex started to wear off, and then it was a trap, chains slowing my ascent.

Hex set me free. I was on top of the pyramid, self-actualized.

And then I ran out of pills, again. I’d stretched out my intake as long as I could, knowing Hungarian’s murder would make things tense with Egbert.

Anxiety forced me to procrastinate, pushing out a meet as late as I could. Hoping to have some small talk options on deck, I watched the most recent episode of
The League of Zeroes
. Alex Aurora’s chest-boxed light display and projector eye made a big splash with the audience, but as with prior challengers, no one was able to unseat Buddy the Brain. There was something fundamentally unsettling about seeing his brain in a box outside his body. The risk involved was unparalleled, the technology—cables running from brain box to a spinal column interface at the base of his skull—was borderline mystical. Most doctors interviewed confessed to ignorance of the mechanics. They said Buddy should be dead. Buddy said they should work harder, and refused to reveal the name of his surgeon, who he could now afford to keep on confidential contract.

The guest musician that week was Robbie Dawn, pushing his creepy smarm and blue-eyed retro-soul. His cover of Marvin Gaye’s “You Sure Love to Ball” had become an internet sensation and scored him a cross-generational hit that funded his independent label SonsJeunes. He’d had twelve number ones since his crossover, and you couldn’t hit a club night in town without hearing one of his songs, or at least a remix. Most news stories focused on his business acumen and quick rise to fame, but everybody knew what really made all Robbie Dawn songs work: the drums. Those fucking drums, popping, exploding, insisting on their place at the center of your skull. The rhythms and tones swirled in a way that sunk right into your guts. You were nodding your head three seconds before one of those songs even started. Robbie refused to allow tours of his studio. When asked about his signature sound he played cavalier. “I like a certain tone, always have since I was young. But nobody was making the music I wanted to hear, so I had to innovate. I will say that I have a private database of drum sounds, and that the odds of anyone successfully copying what I do are one in a million. Now can we talk about my kids’ charity?”